There are many aspects of quality in a business context, though the primary is the idea that business produces something, whether it be a physical good or a particular service.
These goods and/or services and how they are produced involve many types of processes, procedures, equipment, personnel, and investments, which all fall under the quality umbrella. Key aspects of quality and how it’s diffused throughout the business are rooted in the concept of quality management.
Quality management is the act of overseeing all activities and tasks that must be accomplished to maintain a desired level of excellence. This includes the determination of a quality policy, creating and implementing quality planning and assurance, and quality control and quality improvement.
A quality management system helps keep us on track to achieve customer-specific requirements, legal requirements. Moreover, QMS helps push organizations on the path of continuous improvement.
ISO 9001: 2015 is the most accepted global standard, specifying requirements of Quality management systems.
Long Term Success of any organization is based on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Quality management helps achieve these two utterly important goals.
Table of Contents
Quality management System Components
Quality planning
“Failing to plan is planning to fail”
Benjamin Franklin
Planning is the most important stage but ironically this is the stage people mess up the most. Improper planning leads to a very high cost of quality.
The cost of Quality varies depending on the stage it is taken care of at. Fixing a problem at the design stage, for example, is much cheaper than fixing it in production, and fixing it in production is massively cheaper than fixing it once it’s gone out the door.
So the starting point is quality planning — creating a process that will be able to meet established goals and do so under operating conditions. The subject matter of the planning can be anything; an office process for producing documents; an engineering process for designing products; a factory process for producing goods; a service process for responding to customers’ requests.
Quality planning involves following steps
- Understanding the Customer(both internal and external)
The internal customer is one who uses your output as their input to produce products or services for the next internal customer or the external customer.
External Customer is the end-user of the product or service provided by your organization. External customers have a choice to use or not use our product or service, and if they don’t like our product or service, they can take their business elsewhere.
If you don’t know who your customer is? You won’t know their expectations. Hence can’t work to meet or exceed customer expectations, making a quality product or service a far dream.
So it’s extremely important that we understand who our customer is? and work on meeting or exceeding their expectations.
- Determining Customer needs
Customer needs are called “Voice of Customer”.Voice of Customer can be collected through the following methods.
- Surveys
- Customer Interviews
- Customer Audits
- Past complaints
- Competitive analysis
- Focus Group
- Social Media
If you are doing activities that do not bring your product or service closer to customer expectations, you are throwing darts in the dark.
Customer needs involve compliance to various international standards such as ISO 9001: 2015, ISO 45001: 2018, etc.
- Develop product features that respond to customer needs. (Products include both goods and services.)
Once we have ascertained customer needs, we need to build our product or service around these needs.
Products or service features shall respond to customer needs. Based on customer needs product or service features are converted into measurable characteristics and these characteristics are monitored throughout the product or service development phase.
- Establish quality goals that meet the needs of customers and suppliers alike
Suppose two friends are pulling a cart. One is pulling it to the left and the other is pulling it to the right. Will the cart be able to move? Can you see the problem?
The goals of these two friends are not aligned and that’s the problem restricting cart movement.
The same is true for the quality. We can deliver desired quality if the goals of each member of the organization are aligned. It is extremely important that we define quality goals with the customer at the center and communicate it down the line.
Quality goals shall be clear and specific.
- Develop a process that can produce the needed product features.
At this stage, we develop and document each and every process involved in the preparation of the product or delivery of the service.
This stage involves preparation, documentation, and standardization of various standards and work instruction.
- Prove that the process can meet the quality goals under operating conditions.
The ultimate goal of quality planning is to design a process that will be able to meet established goals under operating conditions.
This stage is a validation of processes established in previous stages. This step is not just about validation but acting on the feedback we get from validation.PPAP is a popularly accepted form of approval or validation from various customers globally.
To Read More about PPAP: Click Here
Various Quality Planning tools are as follows
- Force Field analysis
- Affinity Diagram
- Interrelationship Diagram
- Failure Mode and Effect Analysis
- Customer Need Matrix
Quality assurance or QA
Assurance in literal terms is nothing but a positive declaration of a product or service, which gives confidence.
Hence, Quality Assurance is defined as a procedure to ensure the quality of products or services provided to the customers by an organization. Quality assurance focuses on improving the development process and making it efficient and effective as per the quality standards defined.
Quality assurance methodology involves the PDCA cycle(Plan Do Check Act).
PDCA steps are repeated to ensure that processes followed in the organization are evaluated and improved on a periodic basis.
Plan – The organization should plan and establish the process-related objectives and determine the processes that are required to deliver a high-Quality end product.
Do – Development and testing of Processes and also “do” necessary changes in the processes
Check – Monitoring of processes, modifying the processes, and checking whether it meets the predetermined objectives
Act – A Quality Assurance Executive should implement actions that are necessary to achieve improvements in the processes.
Quality control or QC
Quality Control, as the name suggests, involves monitoring to maintain desirable quality. The main aim of Quality control is to check whether the products or services meet the specifications and requirements of the customer.
Quality assurance is focused on process whereas quality control is focused on the product or services itself.
Quality control is a subset of quality assurance. Quality control is the inspection and rectification of product or service features in regular operations.
Quality improvement or QI
There are multiple strategies one can follow to improve quality. Before we move any further it is important to understand that quality improvement is not a one time activity but a continuous process. It’s like going to the gym. You have to do exercise not only to build muscle but to maintain it as well.
Following are the quality improvement strategies
- PDCA or PDSA : PDCA stands for Plan Do Check Act and PDCA stands for Plan Do Study Act. PDCA or PDSA is an iterative four-step management method used in business for the control and continuous improvement of processes and products.It is also called deming’s cycle.
- FADE : FADE is also a four step process.F in FADE stands for Focus.A in FADE stands for Analyze ,D in FADE stands for develop and E in FADE stands for Evaluate.FADE model was developed by Consulting Firm Organizational Dynamics Institute, Wakefield.
- Six Sigma Strategy : It is a very important method of Quality Improvement. The term ‘Six Sigma’ is derived from the Greek letter, Sigma which denotes standard deviation of time from the mean. Six sigma is a five stage process DMAIC.DMAIC stands for Define Measure,Analyze,Improve and Control.This method was developed by Motorola company.
- Total Quality management : A core definition of total quality management (TQM) describes a management approach to long-term success through customer satisfaction. In a TQM effort, all members of an organization participate in improving processes, products, services, and the culture in which they work.
What are the benefits of a Quality management system?
Research confirms that implementing a QMS such as ISO 9001 or 13485 can offer near-term benefits to adopting organizations. One Harvard Business Review study focused on organizations who achieved ISO certification, and found these companies have higher rates of “corporate survival, sales, employment growth, and wage increases than a matched group of non-adopters.”
- Improved customer satisfaction
Since a quality management system is designed with customer satisfaction at its center. Hence implementation of a quality management system leads to improved customer satisfaction.
- Improved Project Success Rate
If I tell you there is an open manhole on the street. You will be careful and keep your eye on the street all the time and the probability of you falling in that manhole reduces, as compared to a situation where you are not aware of manhole presence.QMS helps organizations in a similar manner.
QMS helps in a better-planned framework, improved project implementation. All this results in a better project success rate.
- Reduction in Rework
All company’s efforts are directed on manufacturing quality products. The products’ quality is continuously measured. If any defects occur, they are immediately corrected. Such an organization of production reduces the amount of rework to the minimum.
- Improved Customer Confidence
When you comply with global standards such as ISO 9001:2015 or ISO 45001: 2018, etc, it instills confidence in customers.
It saves them time and appraisal cost of the regular evaluation, as they are confident that things are in place, as your organization complies with global standards.
- Improved Employee Engagement
In the Quality management system, all the processes are well documented and are available to all concerned persons. It brings clarity amongst employees, also since QMS involves interdepartmental interaction, it seeks active participation.
It leads to improved employee engagement. The more the company has engaged employees, the better its process is organized and the higher its effectiveness.
- Creating a culture of continual improvement
QMS introduces organizations to the concept of continual improvement. The continual improvement of the quality of the products or services allows companies to find cost-saving solutions and to increase their effectiveness.
- Reducing Mistakes
Quality management system implementation incorporates action taken against all the previous failures. This helps reduce the repetition of those mistakes.
When you travel with a list of belongings you are carrying, chances are less that you would misplace any of your belongings.
Proper Quality planning and continual improvement mindset help in reducing the number of mistakes and certainly help eliminate repetition of the same problems.
- Reducing Waste
I would reiterate that the cost of Quality varies depending on the stage it is taken care of. Fixing a problem at the design stage, for example, is much cheaper than fixing it in production, and fixing it in production is massively cheaper than fixing it once it’s gone out the door.
Implementation of a Quality management system promotes working on reducing the cost of quality. It indeed can be achieved by reducing waste.
Tools such as 7QC tools,5 Why analysis, etc can be used to reduce manufacturing waste.
References
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